Last week, we met with an inspiring Focus organizing team from Queen's College.

They are thinking very big: building a 1/31/08Focus event in NYC large enough to engage the Presidential candidates in a serious discussion of clean energy solutions for America.(www.focusthenation.org)

This is clearly one of those times in history when people across the country—including the team at Queens-- are setting aside their normal lives, and devoting themselves to changing the future.

Here is the civil rights analogy: 1955 was the Montgomery Bus Boycott; 1960, the Greensboro Sit-ins; 1963, the March on Washington. And then in 1964, the Civil Rights Act. Katrina was the Montgomery moment for the global warming solutions movement. The hurricane brought global warming into America’s living rooms, highlighted human vulnerability, and framed global warming as an overarching issue of social justice.

The faith community (www.regenerationproject.org) and student leaders (www.climatechallenge.org) gave us our Greensboro, with their national showings of Inconvenient Truth, at thousands of locations across the country. And now we need to get from 1960 to 1964 in sixteen months. That is how long we have to build an educated and mobilized public powerful enough to put a serious clean energy agenda at the forefront of American political dialogue in 2008.

American social movements culminate in national legislation that fundamentally changes the direction of the country. The Civil Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act. We need—in 2009—a Climate Act strong enough to do the job. While in New York, we spoke with a research scientist who works in Antarctica . He reiterated Jim Hansen’s point: we are likely very close to crossing an emissions threshold that could lock in partial if not total collapse of the West Antarctic and Greenland Ice sheets.

Here is what you can do to change that future. Over the next month, commit to getting five people who care about global warming-- colleagues, friends, faith leaders, community leaders—involved in Focus the Nation. (www.focusthenation.org) Ask them out for coffee, tell them that this is a critical time in human history, and get them engaged.

You can also help with dollars. Visit www.focusthenation.org/supportus.php today, and donate $500, or $200, or $30 to Focus the Nation. If we can raise $10,000 in donations soon, we can hire a full time organizer for the next few critical months, working to recruit more and more and more people—from America’s high schools, and colleges, from the faith community and civic organizations--- to join Focus the Nation.

Unlike our civil rights forbears, no one is threatening us with dogs or firehoses, or beatings or bombings as we work to organize a nation. But our commitment needs to rise to that level. We have a year to change the future. http://www.focusthenation.org/fullsignup.php Thanks for the work you are doing.